jira ticket email creation

[johnL]

are anyone run into an issue of having constant loop unlimited loop of tickets created by email? we had an issue where someone send a email to create a ticket but CC an alias that auto responds making a loop that created about 60 tickets back to back and making JIRA crash. Besides making sure that ppl do not add that alias or disable that alias is there a way to prevent this on the JIRA side ?

[William Crighton [CCC] · Accepted solution]

Whoa!

@johnL - if your JIRA server was crashed by a mail loop creating only 60 issues then there's going to be other problems to look into after the looping issue is fixed - I've seen a modest server handle the addition of 20K (or 200K, can't remember) comments to a JIRA issue due to a mail loop - and even then the server didn't crash, specifically, it just stopped being able to successfully complete any indexing operation .... which for all intent and purpose was equal to a server crash, it was just that since users could still login to the server it wasn't 'technically' crashed.

You'll need to supply more intel before anyone will be able to help you fix you problem - namely the usual suspects (JIRA version, JDK version) plus some details about your mail server and mail handler configuration (such as which mail server hosts the JIRA mailbox your email handler processes and then what email handler ya'll are using, plus how it's configured) . The strongest preventer for stopping a loop is the Bulk flag which is defined on the page the below text was lifted from:

Bulk

This option only affects 'bulk' email messages whose header has either its Precedence: field set to bulk or its Auto-Submitted field set to the keyword value other than no. Such messages would typically be sent by an automated service. When such an email message is received, the following action will be performed, based on the option you choose:

1. Ignore the email and do nothing.
2. Forward the email (i.e. to the address set in the Forward Email text field).
3. Delete the email permanently.

It is generally a good idea to set bulk=forward and set a Forward Email address, to prevent mail loops between JIRA and another automated service (eg. another JIRA installation).

However, I'm not convinced this will prevent your looping - the conditions under which Exchange modifies those values are mostly concerned with preventing automated systems from carrying on needless conversations about invalid addresses, vacation auto-responders, and so on. For more details you can investigate this more using the following site: http://www.google.com (sry...can't help but be a smart ass)

Seriously though wikipedia defines these flags as:

• Precedence: commonly with values "bulk", "junk", or "list"; used to indicate that automated "vacation" or "out of office" responses should not be returned for this mail, e.g. to prevent vacation notices from being sent to all other subscribers of a mailing list. Sendmail uses this header to affect prioritization of queued email, with "Precedence: special-delivery" messages delivered sooner. With modern high-bandwidth networks delivery priority is less of an issue than it once was. Microsoft Exchange respects a fine-grained automatic response suppression mechanism, the X-Auto-Response-Suppress header.^[70]

^{Hope something in there helps. If it does please click that little up arrow knowing that there are teams of dark clothed mutants sitting in unlit rooms compiling a list of names...names of people whose entire future could possible be affected by how many of their posts resulted in an 'upvote'}

[Arthur Gonçalves]

Hi John,

What is your current JIRA version? Please check this KB for a work-around.

-- Arthur Gonçalves